To The Mountaintop
A passage from Yoga and the Quest for Self by Stephen Cope.
“In the world of yoga, you must remember that there are hell realms and heavenly realms and animal realms and other realms where souls abide. But the human realms are the most precious. Here in the human realms we suffer, but we also have the tools to wake up. And unlike the heavenly realms of the devas and brahmas, celestial beings, we have the desire to wake up. The human realms have just the right mixture of pleasure and pain to produ us toward taking the path of liberation.”
“You have come to live in the gurus house, now. This is a very auspicious time, you know. Maybe thousands of lifetimes you wait for this. You must be very careful not to waste it.” Amrit talked about the preciousness of taking a period of time to live quietly, deliberately, away from the restlessness of our culture. “There must be movement back and forth from the mountaintop to the marketplace, but just now is a moment for the mountaintop. How will you use it, I wonder?” He talked about how yogis discovered the amazing potentioals present in the “seed of the self” and challenged us to be yogic scientists, to experiment while we were at Kripalu with those ways of living that helped us to be fully alive. He urged us to tune in carefully to our energy, to listen to it, not to abuse it. “A conscious use of energy is the hallmark of the yogic lifestyle.”